Yayoi Kusama, Japanese avant-garde artist known for polka dot motifs, dies at 97

Announcement and causes of death

Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August 2026 at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 97. Her death was caused by multiple organ failure, according to a confirmation issued on 27 August 2026 by her longtime gallery representative David Zwirner following reports by Kyodo News and Jiji Press. The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo and her official website published statements confirming that she painted until her final days, never setting aside her brush. Her studio stated that it will continue her artistic mission, sharing her work to offer hope and strength to international audiences. Kusama worked continuously across more than seven decades, creating thousands of paintings, sculptures, poems, novels, and environmental installations.

Early years in Matsumoto and Kyoto

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, where her family operated a commercial seed nursery. During her childhood, she regularly walked through surrounding fields of violets to sketch flowers in notebooks. She experienced intense visual hallucinations from an early age, describing visions of auras, flashes of light, talking animals, and dense fields of dots. To cope with the distress of these experiences, she turned to drawing repetitive patterns, including a portrait of her mother created around age 10 that was covered in spots. In 1948, at age 19, she enrolled at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts to study traditional nihonga painting.

It's been one of the great privileges of my professional life to have been able to represent Yayoi Kusama's extraordinary art for the last fifteen years.

New York avant-garde and anti-war performances

Frustrated by social constraints in postwar Japan, Kusama moved to the United States in 1957. In New York, she established her reputation with her Infinity Net series, producing large monochrome canvases covered in repetitive white loops against dark grounds. Her approach to serial repetition influenced contemporaries in the New York avant-garde scene, including pop artist Andy Warhol. During the late 1960s, she staged controversial public performance events known as happenings, painting polka dots onto the bodies of nude participants. Kusama aligned her performances with anti-war protests, even sending an open letter to US President Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him if he ended the Vietnam War.

Return to Tokyo and infinity installations

Facing severe neuroses, Kusama returned to Japan in the 1970s and voluntarily entered a Tokyo psychiatric hospital around 1977. She lived at the medical facility for the rest of her life, traveling each morning to her nearby studio to paint. Her studio practice yielded works including the My Eternal Soul painting series, yellow pumpkin sculptures, and soft sculptures covering phallic objects and everyday furniture. Known for wearing bright orange and red wigs alongside dot-covered dresses, she exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Kusama made her final trip to New York in 2013 for a solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery that generated hour-long visitor lines.

Dots come flying everywhere - on my dress, the floor, things I'm carrying, throughout the house, the ceiling. And I paint them.